Daily business briefing

Spirit Airlines starts service from DIA

MESA, Ariz. - Spirit Airlines is kicking off its new service between Denver International Airport and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport.

The Florida-based low cost carrier will have one daily non-stop each way beginning Thursday. The flights leave Denver at midmorning each day and leave the east Phoenix suburb of Mesa for the return late in the morning.

Spirit touts low fares but makes up some of the difference with fees that account for 40 percent of its revenue. The average customer pays more than $100 per round trip in fees.

Hickenlooper touts natural gas autos

OKLAHOMA CITY - An initiative launched by the governors of Oklahoma and Colorado to encourage the production of compressed natural gas vehicles for their state fleets has produced more than 100 bids from vehicle dealerships in 28 states, the two said Thursday.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said the bids represent significant savings when compared to the cost of converting gasoline- or diesel-burning vehicles, freeing up scarce taxpayer dollars for other needs.

A total of 22 states are now participating in the initiative, enough to demonstrate to vehicle manufacturers that there is "pent-up demand" for CNG vehicles, she said.

Fallin said there are about 11,000 vehicles in Oklahoma's state fleet system and 15,000 in Colorado's. She said 38 percent of Oklahoma's state vehicles have more than 100,000 miles on them and the state replaces up to 700 vehicles a year.

Hickenlooper said natural gas burns cleaner and is less expensive than gasoline and diesel, and predicted there will be sufficient demand for CNG vehicles within two years that they will be widely available nationwide for public fleets and private car buyers.

"In the next couple of years we're going to have cleaner air," Hickenlooper said. "The potential for exponential change is dramatic."

Facebook reaches
1 billion users

NEW YORK - More than a billion people now log into Facebook each month to check up on old friends, tag photos of new ones and post about politics, religion, cats or what their kids are doing.

That's double the 500 million it hit in July 2010 - what now seems like a lifetime but was a little more than two years ago. August 2008 marked another big juncture, 100 million users.

The latest milestone also amounts to nearly half of the world's roughly 2.5 billion Internet users, as measured by the International Telecommunications Union.

Most of them - 81 percent - live outside of the U.S. and Canada. Many of them log in on mobile devices rather than personal computers, and the company now has 600 million mobile users.

The people joining now are young, with a median age of 22. It was 23 in 2010 and 26 in 2008 and 2007. Most of them are from Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States. They are unlikely to be from China, . And millions of them are not actual people. Facebook acknowledged in August that 8.7 percent of its then-955 million users may be duplicate or false accounts.

Coloradoan news services

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Daily business briefing

Spirit Airlines is kicking off its new service between Denver International Airport and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. The Florida-based low cost carrier will have one daily non-stop each way